The girl sat very still after that, trembling a little in her heart; finally she asked, her voice shaking slightly, “Mr. Howard, what can one do about such things?”

“Very little,” was the reply, “for they must always be; but at least one can keep his own life earnest and true.  A woman who felt such things very keenly might be an inspiration to a man who was called upon to battle with selfishness and evil.”

“You are thinking of Arthur once more?” asked the girl.

“Yes,” answered the other, with a slight smile.  “It would be a happy memory for me, to know that I have been able to give you such an ideal.  Some of these days, you see, I am hoping that we shall again have a poet with a conviction and a voice, so that men may know that sympathy and love are things as real as money.  I am quite sure there never was a nation so ridiculously sodden as our own just at present; all of our maxims and ways of life are as if we were the queer little Niebelung creatures that dig for treasure in the bowels of the earth, and see no farther than the ends of their shovels; we live in the City of God, and spend all our time scraping the gold of the pavements.  Your uncle told me this morning that he did not see why a boy should go to college when he can get a higher salary if he spends the four years in business.  I find that there is nothing to do but to run away and live alone, if one wants really to believe that man is a spiritual nature, with an infinite possibility of wonder and love; and that the one business of his life is to develop that nature by contact with things about him; and that every act of narrow selfishness he commits is a veil which he ties about his own eyes, and that when he has tied enough of them, not all the pearl and gold of the gorgeous East can make him less a pitiable wretch.”

Mr. Howard stopped again, and smiled slightly; Helen sat gazing thoughtfully ahead, thinking about his way of looking at life, and how very strange her own actions seemed in the light of it.  Suddenly, however, because throughout all the conversation there had been another thought in her consciousness, she glanced ahead and urged the horse even faster.  She saw far in the distance the houses of the place to which she was bound, and she said nothing more, her companion also becoming silent as he perceived her agitation.

Helen had been constantly growing more anxious, so that now the carriage could not travel fast enough; it seemed to her that everything depended upon what she might find at Hilltown.  It was only the thought of Arthur that kept her from feeling completely free from her wretchedness; she felt that she might remedy all the wrong that she had done, and win once more the prize of a good conscience, provided only that nothing irretrievable had happened to him.  Now as she came nearer she found herself imagining more and more what might have happened, and becoming more and more impatient.  There was a balance dangling before her eyes, with utter happiness on one side and utter misery on the other; the issue depended upon what she discovered at Hilltown.